I was very impressed when I heard BBC Radio Scotland’s Open All Mics program today. Rather than the live-game-with-studio-updates model which has dominated football radio broadcasting in Scotland since I can remember, Open All Mics mimics the format made popular by Jeff Stelling and his cronies on Sky Sports—Soccer Saturday, I believe they call it (though I’ve always thought myself a football fan!) The format is studio-based and features constant match updates from reporters at the different matches, and discussion between pundits when there’s not much happening.
Anyway, to business. Open All Mics has opened a Twitter account, and have been filling my feed with goal updates all afternoon, like a 2.0 version of the BBC’s legendary Vidiprinter. So far so good, but very one-way. What really impressed me today was that fans attending games were then invited to send in their own half-time reports. This brings in a whole new level of interactivity. While Richard Gordon and the team at the BBC are able to read out the ‘best’ ones, it also allows anyone with a Twitter account to read all of those @messages and get a real flavour of what’s going on around the country. It’s also a very, very cheap method of content generation for the Beeb, so everyone’s a winner, right? (The BBC have also started to read out messages left on the Pie and Bovril messageboard in their TV final score program – something that I have some slight reservations about, since it smacks a bit more of unlicensed use of content; unlike @messages, that are clearly meant for them to use.)
That aside, well done BBC Scotland, for an innovative use of the technology available to you.
Edit: I should say that Open All Mics can be followed at @openallmics!
Social Media, football
bbc, crowdsourcing, football, openallmics, twitter
I’ve spent a portion of tonight collaborating with some colleagues across the country to drum up support and attendees for TeachMeet Student Edition 2009. I’m not going to go into great detail about what TeachMeets are, because this is widely covered in many other places, most notably the TeachMeet website (http://teachmeet.pbworks.com). What I can do is vouch for TeachMeets as being the most relevant, satisfying and worthwhile CPD I’ve been involved in, eschewing as it does the ‘I-will-now-read-this-powerpoint-to-you’ type of presentation by keeping it short (you get 7 minutes to set up and speak) and maintaining a friendly and informal atmosphere.
Tonight’s collaboration focussed on contacting Probationer Leaders in all 32 local authorities to promote the event to their charges. Stuart Meldrum set up this Google Spreadsheet to coordinate contacting each authority – the idea being, it’s better to get someone who the Probationer leader knows (or at least, has heard of) to contact them rather than a blanket email from one unknown email address. So far 18 out of 32 authorities (nine sixteenths of the total, level D maths fans!) have been contacted, but that leaves 14 still to be contacted.
If you are able to help with this task, by contacting someone in an authority you know, then please add your details to this spreadsheet!
Contact details for the leaders are available on the GTCS Probationers website.
It was amazing to watch this all happen tonight, and an affirmation of the value of building a network of colleagues – TeachMeets and Twitter have been invaluable in this.
edit: I should say that Iain Hallahan (twitter) has been instrumental in making all of this happen tonight. Cheers Iain!
Education
#tmse09, planning, probationers, teachmeet, twitter
I was up stupidly early the other day, and having already played World of Warcraft quite extensively, I stuck on the telly. I was delighted (and maybe a bit embarassed) to discover that they still show ‘Pages from Ceefax’ when there’s nothing else to put on in the morning. I was flooded with fond memories of reading Digitiser and the music pages on C4, and also of those times when a lack of TV or radio coverage meant that the only way of following some football matches was by sitting watching the Teletext pages tick round and cheering when you got a score update (one in your favour, at least).
Fast forward a few days, when I found a good friend stuck for coverage of a Scottish lower-league play-off; too low key for even local radio coverage, and no chance of even a sniff at live TV coverage (even BBC Alba have turned their nose up at it!) What solution then? It turns out that his local newspaper have a twitter account, and have sent a reporter to live tweet coverage from the final. Amazing stuff, and a brilliant use of the technology. I had a wee look at it and all in all, it’s not a terrible way to follow a game of football (better than watching teletext flick round anyway!) We came to the conclusion that the experience is not unlike watching a game of Championship Manager (and yeah, I know it’s called Football Manager now, but I like that think that since playing it since v1.0 on the Atari ST, I can call it Champ if I want. Same goes for Opal Fruits. n00bs.)
This is unlikely to become an entirely widespread way of consuming football. Most football that ordinary people care about is covered to the point of saturation in mainstream media, but I wonder how useful it would be for people who do support they many, many less-well-supported teams around the world. It all points to the power of Twitter as a medium, the power to live broadcast facts, views and thoughts from just about anywhere, and to build sporadic communities round about events through hashtagging. Wow. Credit to the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser (twitter: @acadvertiser) for coming up with this. One thing though, if that was my paper, I would feel absolutely no shame about chucking out an occasional advert for the paper itself during the coverage, seems like a fair exchange; since not everyone is going to follow them, preferring instead to follow using a service like twitterfall.com
Social Media
ceefax, commentary, football, socialmedia, technology, teletext, twitter
As a semi-frequent Twitterer, irregular blogger but seemingly full time computer user, it seemed to me that I should try and gather all of these things in one place. This was also spurred by a desire to buy the names I use for online identities in various places. As such, I bought my own name, and also my Twitter username @dalzinho. (It should be said as well, that Dalzinho is also the name of a really highly specced Scottish international midfield dynamo who, thanks to the editor feature, has appeared in various versions of Pro Evo that I’ve owned in the past.) The domain dalzinho.com redirects to here. So, to cut a long story short, I hope to aggregate more of my online stuff here, as seems to be the fashion these days. I’ve currently got my delicious links, and also some twitter stuff. In the next couple of days I’ll likely add flickr as well. That’ll be a treat for you all 
Meta
blogs, dalzinho, domains, twitter